retro recipe road test: Nancy Drew’s potted ham sandwich and hot chocolate

Essentially, ham salad +.a nice normal hot chocolate.

Soooo much less horrifying than every other food I’ve made for this blog.

I swear, I don’t just eat ham sandwiches constantly - but I had a lot left over from the hamnana experiment, so I thought it’d be fun to do a quick recipe test. Featuring Nancy Drew in one of her more ….normal adventures!

Nancy Drew rarely cooks for herself throughout the course of the series. Even in later books, when she travels to other states, Hannah tags along and helps cook for her. When Hannah’s not around, she’s eating at restaurants. It makes sense, to a degree. You’re not going to stop in the middle of tailing a jewel robbery suspect to cook a full dinner.

There’s a few exceptions to this of course, usually earlier on in the series, and almost always when Nancy is nursing someone else back to health. 

In Sign of the Twisted Candles, Carol (orphaned, sweet, cinnamon roll too pure for this world, etc) has been attacked by her former guardians and their henchmen, and hasn’t eaten properly for days, so Nancy raids the hotel kitchen for any food, and finds some nonperishables.

“Nancy found canned chocolate milk, potted ham, and some relatively fresh bread. She made a sandwich and heated the milk.”

Ham spread from a grocery store isn’t strictly potted ham - that’s difficult to find premade in my area, and is quite old fashioned. Potted ham is a spiced ground ham mixture/paste that’s preserved under a layer of clarified butter, to keep it from going bad. It may sound a little weird that she didn’t add anything else, but keep in mind that the butter on top and spices/mustard would have essentially made this a ready-made sandwich kit. The Runaway Spoon has a good recipe, if you want to make your own.

So, no potted ham. Instead I added a layer of butter to the toasted bread and mixed some mustard and cloves into the ham spread.

Cucumber pictured here was to be sliced and eaten as a side dish if ham sandwich/cocoa combo was too rich.

Nancy didn’t say how she served the sandwich, but the Underwood Ham ads from this time period have them cut either in half, or in quarters, diagonally, if they’re cut at all. I couldn’t imagine it’d be accurate to hand a scared kid a massive, unsliced pile of bread and ham, so quarters it is.

It doesn’t really bode well for this that “greatest sandwich in the world” is in scare quotes. Good thing I like deviled ham.

I made chocolate milk with some leftover chocolate syrup, and heated it up on the stove. I was initially wary about the milk being too sweet, so I also made a pot of coffee just in case I couldn’t finish it.

Conveniently for my testing purposes, it was raining quite hard outside, just like in the book.

WAS IT GOOD?

Yes, and no. 

I like both of these foods already, so I’m a little biased. But I really did feel that the added spices and butter were essential to making this a good sandwich. I’d love to try it with homemade potted ham, I’m sure it’d be even better.

Heating the milk added the extra step of making the meal feel super comforting, especially in the middle of a thunderstorm. I could see this being a great choice for someone who needs a warm and filling meal after a lot of work outside in the rain - or running from kidnappers.

On the flip side, however, this was SO, so rich, and so heavy. I didn’t have any trouble eating everything, but I did feel like I needed a nap after finishing the sandwich portion. Drinking the last sip of chocolate milk even made me feel a little nauseous, but it passed quickly. 

This would definitely be a good camping food, or something filling to make if the power in your house went out. But I don’t think I’d make it on a regular weekday.

7/10.